Unusual People Do things Differently - Review

Author : T.G.C.Prasad

Price   : 399/-

Publishers: Penguin Book India

My Rating : 4/5

The description on the back of this book is very apt. So I am pasting here the same :

Unusual people are ordinary people who strive hard to do extraordinary things. They are sensitive to nuances, look to provide lateral solutions, dare to think out of the box, and often end up changing the rules of the game.

T.G.C. Prasad presents the views and experiences of sixty-five individuals, from well-known names like Mike Lawrie, Azim Premji and Mother Teresa to a chef, a masseuse and a service boy, with whom he has had meaningful interactions and who have inspired him. He includes people from a broad professional spectrum; CEOs, doctors, the director general of police, realtors, an attorney, a chartered accountant, a consultant and a sports coach are among those who make his list. Singling out a dominant factor from each person’s story, he outlines the journeys these people undertook and the behaviours they exhibited, and shows how these link up to the results they achieved.

The 65 chapters are aligned into 6 themes:

1.  Strategic and focused on the value creation
2.  Perceptive and derive creative solutions
3.  Driven by business excellence
4.  Deploy professional skills to win
5.  Passionate and lead from the front
6.  Sensitive to people and are customer centric

Though the book is divided into themes, but it doesn’t make any difference even if you read the chapters randomly.

This book is on the management learning mainly from observing people and how they react to real-life situations. Broad areas of management topics are covered - from the global level insights on mergers and acquisitions of the companies to tips on negotiating and real life examples on how to be costumer centric.

Author did a good work by succinctly conveying what he wanted to, in simple language.

There are some informative and inspirational parts that will kick your butt. I particularly liked the topics that focused on negotiating, VC’s, mergers of companies, sales tips and entrepreneurship.

If you have already read a lot of books on management/entrepreneurship then there are only a few chapters that may enlighten you..

But there are take-aways in every chapter to those who are new to this kind of book.

The author, TGC Prasad also wrote a fiction, Along The Way. Rarely we find authors who can deal with both fiction and non-fiction efficiently. Prasad is surely one among them.

Some of the insights from this book:

• Sometimes things don’t go the way we want them to. The best thing to do is to jump in at the right opportunity and make a difference.
• If you want your business to succeed, then you should have a strong desire to make money and really feel bad if you love money.
• Be patient; it’s a long way to the top. Live life as you climb.
• Successful negotiators make the other party feel that they are winning
• Never fear to negotiate and never negotiate in fear.
• People who are employed seek security in their jobs, whereas business people think about generating security.
• Strategy always has to be contextual.
• Happiness is an internal stimulus, irrespective of what happens externally. If you choose to be happy, nobody can stop you.
• Keep your needs basic and life will be peaceful.

Important questions before starting a business : 

• What are you selling ? who is your customer? Why does the customer want to buy your product or service ?
• How long can you sustain yourself and your family without a job ? can you generate business ? do you have any customers right now who are willing to give you assignments?

About the Author: T.G.C. Prasad lives in Bangalore and offers strategic, advisory, general management and HR consulting services to several start-ups, small and medium enterprises, Indian and MNC companies. He also offers executive coaching to senior management.

You can buy this book on Infibeam for 259/- here and for 279/- on Flipkart here

On Writing by Stephen King

'On Writing", a memoir of Stephen King is a must read for every wanna-be story writer. First half of the book is on King's life and the rest is about story writing. His insights on drafting and story developing are priceless. 

These are some of the valuable insights( at least to me)/interesting parts from the book:   

• Your job isn't to find the ideas but to recognize them when they show up.
• When you write a story, you’re telling yourself the story.
• Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work.
• When you rewrite, your main job is taking out all the things that are not the story.
• Write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open. Your stuff starts out being just for you, in other words, but then it goes out. Once you know what the story is and get it right - as right as you can, anyway—it belongs to anyone who wants to read it.
• The door closes the rest of the world out; it also serves to close you in and keep you focused on the job at hand.
• Use the first word that comes to your mind, if it is appropriate and colorful.
• One of the really bad things you can do to your writing is to dress up the vocabulary, looking for long words because you’re maybe a little bit ashamed of your short ones. This is like dressing up a household pet in evening clothes.
• The road to hell is paved with adverbs
• All I ask is that you do as well as you can, and remember that, while to write adverbs is human, to write he said or she said is divine.
• If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There’s no way around these two things that I’m aware of, no shortcut.
• Every book you pick up has its own lesson or lessons, and quite often the bad books have more to teach than the good ones.
• When you write a book, you spend day after day scanning and identifying the trees. When you’re done, you have to step back and look at the forest.
• I suggest a thousand words a day, and because I’m feeling magnanimous, I’ll also suggest that you can take one day a week off, at least to begin with. No more; you’ll lose the urgency and immediacy of your story if you do. With that goal set, resolve to yourself that the door stays closed until that goal is met. Get busy putting those thousand words on paper or on a floppy disk.
• Write what you like, then imbue it with life and make it unique by blending in your own personal  knowledge of life, friendship, relationships, sex, and work. Especially work. People love to read about work. God knows why, but they do.
• In my view, stories and novels consist of three parts: narration, which moves the story from point A to point B and finally to point Z; description, which creates a sensory reality for the reader; and dialogue, which brings characters to life through their speech.
• You may wonder where plot is in all this. The answer—my answer, anyway—is nowhere. I won’t try to convince you that I’ve never plotted any more than I’d try to convince you that I’ve never told a lie, but I do both as infrequently as possible. I distrust plot for two reasons: first, because our lives are largely plotless, even when you add in all our reasonable precautions and careful planning; and second, because I believe plotting and the spontaneity of real creation aren’t compatible. It’s best that I be as clear about this as I can—I want you to understand that my basic belief about the making of stories is that they pretty much make themselves. The job of the writer is to give them a place to grow (and to transcribe them, of course). If you can see things this way (or at least try to), we can work together comfortably. If, on the other hand, you decide I’m crazy, that’s fine. You won’t be the first.
• I believed stories are found things, like fossils in the ground, The writer’s job is to use the tools in his or her toolbox to get as much of each one out of the ground intact as possible. Sometimes the fossil you uncover is small; a seashell. Sometimes it’s enormous, a Tyrannosaurus Rex with all those gigantic ribs and grinning teeth. Either way, short story or thousand-page whopper of a novel, the techniques of excavation remain basically the same.
• Description begins in the writer’s imagination, but should finish in the reader’s.
• It’s also important to remember it’s not about the setting, anyway—it’s about the story, and it’s always about the story. It will not behoove me (or you) to wander off into thickets of description just because it would be easy to do. We have other fish (and steak) to fry.
• When it comes to scene-setting and all sorts of description, a meal is as good as a feast.
• In many cases when a reader puts a story aside because it “got boring,” the boredom arose because the writer grew enchanted with his powers of description and lost sight of his priority, which is to keep the ball rolling.
• One of the cardinal rules of good fiction is never tell us a thing if you can show us, instead.
• You can’t please all of the readers all of the time; you can’t please even some of the readers all of the time, but you really ought to try to please at least some of the readers some of the time.
• In the spring of my senior year at Lisbon High—1966, this would’ve been—I got a scribbled comment that changed the way I rewrote my fiction once and forever. Jotted below the machine-generated signature of the editor was this :“Not bad, but PUFFY. You need to revise for length. Formula: 2nd Draft = 1st Draft – 10%. Good luck.”
• The most important things to remember about back story are that (a) everyone has a history and (b) most of it isn’t very interesting. Stick to the parts that are, and don’t get carried away with the rest. Long life stories are best received in bars, and only then an hour or so before closing time, and if you are buying.
• I must tell you, though, that confidence during the actual writing of this book was a commodity in remarkably short supply.
• The scariest moment is always just before you start. After that, things can only get better.

God Save The Dork - Review

Author: Sidin Vadukut

Publisher: Penguin India

Price: 199/-

My Rating: 4/5

'God Save The Dork' is a sequel to Dork:The Incredible Adventures Of Robin 'Einstein' Varghese

After the voicemail scandal in the first part, Robin ‘Einstein’ Varghese, the protagonist, was promoted in Dufresne. The story of this book was set up in London where Robin was in the Dufresne's team working for their client, Lederman.

This is a hilarious account of how Robin strives to deliver his best in every situation thinking-on-his-feet but ends up doing something stupid. The satires on consultancy field and humour on office culture are continued even in this book like in the previous one.

Robin’s attempts to get the attention of a beautiful chinky intern, difficulties in helping Sugandh (who cannot even prepare his own biodata) to get a job, Raveena Tandon madness, experience with British museums, jealousy on his college mate Rahul Gupta who is now VP of Dufresne, out-of-box thinking to maintain the relation between Dufresne and Lederman, humiliation because of the microphones, his demanding girl friend, office scandal in the end...Oh wait I forgot to mention about ‘Project Mohanlal’ – ROFL...ultimate mallu comedy.

With Sidin's unique style of writing, this book is witty right from the page one. There is also an element of suspense as the story proceeds. The ending is far better than the previous book.

I don’t want this Dork series to end with just three books. Waiting for the next one.

Overall a rib-tickling work, as expected. 

About the Author: Sidin Vadukut is an engineer from NIT Trichy and graduate from IIMA. Currently a columnist and editor with the business newspaper MINT and also a cricket columnist for www.cricinfo.com

You can order your copy on flipkart here for 129/-  and on infibeam for 119/- here

I’m not twenty four...I’ve been nineteen for five years - Review

Author: Sachin Garg

Publisher: Grapevine India

Pages:223 

Price: 100/-

My Rating: 3/5

   The story is about Saumya Kapoor, from Delhi, who is just out of her MBA. She gets an offer from a steel company and in the last minute she comes to know that her posting is in Toranagalu, a small village in Karnataka. She couldn’t imagine her life without shopping malls and short skirts in that village that too with Amit (her college mate whom she hates for various reasons). But as she did not have another option she accepts it and lands in Toranagalu.

   In Toranagalu, she meets Malappa, another new joinee in the plant. He is an interesting guy and Saumya was attracted to him. She gets posted in Safety section of the company where she is required to handle tough jobs. Just when you are about to think that a love story was coming up between Saumya and Malappa, some unexpected incidents in the plant make Saumya’s life more tragic than she imagined.

    At the time when Saumya was in a dilemma whether she could handle the pressure, her relation with Shubhrodeep develops. Saumya met Shubro during her initial days in Toranagalu, in a trip with Amit and Malappa to nearby place. Shubro moves on from place to place for every three months, that is his life style. For three months he stays in Toranagalu in the steel plant with Saumya’s help.

   Saumya likes Shubro but doesn’t reveal it as she fears he may reject her and move on to another place following his move-on theory.

   The rest of story is about how the character Shubro unfolds, Can Saumya handle her job after the disturbing incidents? Did she express her love to Shubro? Will Shubro stay back for Saumya? What is the reason behind his life style?

If you are wondering what happened to Malappa…well, that is another twist in the tale!!   

    The way the book started with the author meeting Saumya in a journey and Saumya telling her story to him reminds me of the CB style. This story will be refreshing for those who got bored with the routine college love stories. The story isn’t predictable...it is gripping till the end. The writing style is good…made this an easy to read. The discussions between Saumya and her friend Varthika are entertaining.

    The thing which attracted me to this book other than the legs on the cover page is that Sachin Garg wrote the story from a girl’s perspective. But unfortunately he is not completely successful in portraying a girl before reader. The emotions of a girl are surely missing.  

   More than Saumya, it is the character Shubro that I liked a lot, author did a good job in developing this character. The way author handled Malappa’s character is a bit disappointing. It would have been better if Malappa has more scope in the story. 

    Overall, a decent work by Sachin. 

About the Author: Sachin is an Engineer from Delhi College of Engineering (DCE) and did his MBA from MDI, Gurgaon. Apart from books, he has a keen interest in strength training activities and travelling. In 2011, he quit his day job to start his own venture in print media.

  

 This review is a part of Book review program at  Blogadda.

A Roller Coaster Ride-When an IITian Met A Bitsian Girl - Review

Author: Saumil Shrivastava

The story starts at IITB where the protagonist Maddy, who is from the same college, meets a girl who came to their cult-fest ‘mood indigo’. That relation ends in tragedy in a couple of days. Next, it is about his encounter with Pooja, whom he met on Orkut. She agrees to be his girlfriend leaving her boyfriend because of Maddy’s IIT brand (that is what she says). Maddy gets a job so he shifts to Gurgoan, where he meets his flat mates - Harsha, Kundan and Dhananjay. The relation with Pooja becomes a distance relation.

    In office he meets Divya, who is a bitsian. Divya becomes Maddy’s best friend. Whenever there is a fight between Maddy and Pooja, Divya sorts it out. As the story proceeds Maddy doubts whether Divya loves him. And he is confused whether he should go after Pooja(with whom he is having problems) leaving Divya( who loves him a lot).. After one incident he realizes Divya is the right one. From there the relation with Divya begins. The rest of the story is about how this relation turns out to be. Will their relation end on a happy note? Or will it be a disaster like his previous experiences? How did the relation of Maddy with his flat mates changes during all this?

    Though this one is quite predictable till the end, the ending justifies the title “roller coaster ride”. I liked the way author portrayed Maddy’s relation with his flat mates.

    As the story advances Maddy inspires to be an entrepreneur. But this point did not show any impact on the story line. There are some characters which come and go without adding anything to the story.

The writing style is fine. This is like real life incidents packed into a single story.

Just-ok type. Not a must read.